Despite the late 1970s national backlash against disco, dance culture&nbsp;flourished in New York during the first years of the 1980s, but entered a period of relative decline across the second half of the decade when a slew of influential parties closed. Critics attribute the slump to the spread of AIDS, and understandably so, for the epidemic devastated the city’s dance scene in a way that began with yet could never be reduced to numbers of lost bodies (Brewster and Broughton, Buckland, Cheren, Easlea, Echols, Shapiro). At the same time, however, the introduction of a slew of neoliberal policies—including welfare cuts, the liberalization of the financial sector, and pro-developer policies—contributed to the rapid rise of the stock market and the real estate market, and in so doing presaged the systematic demise of dance culture in the city. In this article, I aim to explore how landlords who rented their properties to party promoters across the 1970s and early 1980s went on to strike more handsome deals with property developers and boutique merchants during the remainder of the decade, and in so doing forged a form of “real estate determinism” that turned New York City into an inhospitable terrain for parties and clubs.1 While I am sympathetic to David Harvey’s and Sharon Zukin’s critique of the impact of neoliberalism on global cities such as New York, I disagree with their contention that far from offering an oppositional alternative to neoliberalism, cultural workers colluded straightforwardly with the broad terms of that project, as will become clear.

The dance culture that I want to discuss can be traced back tothe beginning of 1970, when parties such as the Loft and the Sanctuarypioneered the weekly practice of all night dancing that would go on tobe labeled (somewhat problematically) “disco.”2Initially off the radar, themovement became highly visible following the opening of Studio 54 inmidtown Manhattan in April 1977 and the release of the movieSaturdayNight Feverlater that year. Disco achieved mainstream saturation across1978—thousands of discotheques opened and the genre outsold rock—onlyfor the combination of the overproduction of the sound and the slowdownin the US economy across 1979 to generate a homophobic, racist, and sexistbacklash against the culture. Led by the Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl,the anti-disco movement highlighted the angst felt by white straight menabout their increasingly uncertain future, and their perception they werelosing ground to gay men, women, and people of color (or the allianceof dispossessed citizens that lay at the heart of the 1970s dance network).The “disco sucks” campaign, then, captured the crisis that enveloped theUnited States as disillusioned citizens sought out scapegoats to blame forthe exhaustion of the postwar settlement, and picked on discophiles alongwith 1960s countercultural activists for leading the country into a cycleof supposedly unproductive hedonism.3However, while the consequencesof the backlash were far-reaching in terms of the number of dance venuesthat closed down nationally, as well as the cuts that were executed in discodepartments across the music industry, New York City’s dance network waslargely unaffected, and the independent record company sector that servedit only temporarily troubled.

Downtown’s private parties survived with ease. “I read about ‘discosucks’ in the paper and that was it,” comments David Mancuso, host of theLoft, the original downtown private party. “It was more of an out-of-NewYork phenomenon. New York was and remains different to the rest of theStates, including Chicago. Out there they had this very negative perception ofdisco, but in New York it was part of this mix of cultures and different typesof music.”4Opened in stages across 1977 and 1978 as an expanded versionof the Loft, the Paradise Garage thrived alongside Mancuso’s spot, especiallywhen owner Michael Brody turned Saturdays into a gay male night (with afemale and straight presence), and maintained the already successful Fridayslot as a mixed night. Flamingo, which catered to an elite white gay malecrowd, and 12 West, which attracted a more economically diverse gay malemembership, also prospered until the theater and bathhouse entrepreneurBruce Mailman opened the Saint on the site of the old Fillmore East at thecost of $5,000,000 in September 1980. Sporting a spectacular planetariumdome above its dance floor, the Saint started to attract 3,000–4,500 dancersevery Saturday from opening night onwards.

Public clubs proliferated across the same period. Among the newspots, the Ritz opened as a rock-oriented discotheque that showcased livebands, the colossal Bonds switched to a similar format when its originalowners become embroiled in a tax scandal, Danceteria operated as asupermarket-style entertainment spot that dedicated separate floors to live music, DJing, and video, and the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge took off asbar and dance venue that prioritized new wave, performance art, and EastVillage drag. Forging a more overtly multicultural aesthetic, the Funhousecaught on around the same time when Jellybean Benitez was hired to DJ atthe spot, and drew in a huge Italian and Latin crowd. A short while later,Ruza Blue’s Wheels of Steel night at Negril and then the Roxy offereda mix of funk, rap, electro, dance, and pancultural sounds. Meanwhilethe Mudd Club continued to integrate elements of punk and disco in itsmix of DJing, live music, art exhibitions, and fashion shows, and Club 57maintained its spirited combination of whacky parties, performance art, andfilm screenings. A number of these spots displayed the work of Jean-MichelBasquiat, Futura 2000, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and other young artistswho could not find a way into SoHo’s already sedimented gallery scene, andgave them jobs if they needed to supplement their income.5As such, theyoperated as inclusive, self-supporting communities that forged a cooperativeethos that contrasted with the neoliberal logic of exploitation, division, andmaximum profit.

Liberated by the decision of the major record companies to withdrawfrom dance along with the loosening up of audience expectations inthe postdisco period, independent record companies such as Island, 99Records, Prelude, Sleeping Bag, Sugar Hill, Tommy Boy, and West Endalso thrived across the early 1980s. Together they reestablished the positionindependent labels enjoyed in the mutually supportive network that definedthe relationship between dance venues, dancers, and recording studios acrossmuch of the 1970s, and although few of their releases went on to achievea national sales profile, the independents were able to thrive on locallygenerated club-based sales that would often run into the tens of thousands.Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan enjoyed his most prolific and creativeperiod as a remixer between 1979 and 1983, and along with figures such asArthur Baker, Afrika Bambaataa, François Kevorkian, Shep Pettibone, andJohn Robie, Levan contributed to the creation of a chaotic, mutant milieuthat drew the sounds of postdisco dance music, rock, dub, and rap into asonic framework that was increasingly electronic.

While late 1970s disco producers recorded within the constraints ofan increasingly demarcated and rigid format, early 1980s dance producersconjured up cross-generic combinations that drew explicitly from rock, dub,and rap. In the case of “Don’t Make Me Wait” by the Peech Boys, bandleadersMichael de Benedictus and Larry Levan introduce cluster storms of echo-heavy electronic handclaps around which a thick, unctuous bass line splurges out massive blocks of reverberant sound, vocalist Bernard Fowlerchannels soul music’s routinized theme of sexual attraction through theerotically charged, transitory environment of the Garage floor, and guitaristRobert Kasper plays hard rock. On another contemporaneous release,David Byrne’s “Big Business” explores the connections that ran betweennew wave, funk and dance while delivering elliptical lyrics that appeared towarn against the country’s rightwards shift. “Over time disco became lessfreeform and more of a formula, and the arrangements also became lessinteresting,” notes Mancuso of the shifting sonic terrain. “There were fewerand fewer good records coming out. It was obvious there would have to bea change. People didn’t want a set of rules. They wanted to dance.”

Neoliberalism and Downtown Culture

The shift to a neoliberal agenda can be traced back to the momentwhen the banking sector began to exert an explicit grip on New York in themid-1970s. Unable to repay its short-term debts as a result of the declineof its industrial manufacturing sector and the flight of white taxpayers,New York’s government was compelled to strike a harsh deal that led to65,000 redundancies, a wage freeze, welfare and services cuts, public transport price hikes, and the abolition of free tuition fees at the City University inreturn for a bailout (Newfield and Barret 3). In the eyes of free-marketeers,the city that had come to symbolize the intractable waste of the 1970sbecame a model of neoliberal adventure. “The management of the New Yorkfiscal crisis pioneered the way for neoliberal practices both domesticallyunder Reagan and internationally through the IMF in the 1980s,” commentsDavid Harvey inA Short History of Neoliberalism. “It established theprinciples that in the event of a conflict between the integrity of f inancialinstitutions and bondholders’ returns on the one hand, and the well-being ofthe citizens on the other, the former was to be privileged. It emphasized thatthe role of government was to create a good business climate rather thanlook to the needs and well-being of the population at large” (48).

A committed Carter supporter, Mayor Ed Koch had little choice butto accept the environment of extreme financial restraint when he assumedoffice in 1978. Yet rather than emphasize his opposition to the settlement, orseek to introduce policies that would support the poor rather than the interestsof large corporations, Koch embraced the fiscal restraints imposed onNew York City with the zeal of a born-again bank manager. As JonathanSoffer notes in his biography of Koch, the mayor’s inaugural speech “reflected a neoliberalism that was far more concerned with ‘businessconfidence’ than with aff irmative action,” and concluded that the “cityhad been too altruistic for its own good, leading to mistakes ‘of the heart’”(146). Koch made gentrif ication “the key to his program for New York’srevival,” adds Soffer (146), and went on to construct a governing coalitionof “real estate, f inance, the Democratic Party machine, the media, and therecipients of city contracts,” comment Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett(3). Struggling with the burden of a $1.8 billion debt in 1975, the city wenton to produce a budget surplus ten years later thanks to strong economicgrowth. “At the same time,” note Newf ield and Barrett, “the poor weregetting poorer, for the boom of the 1980s bypassed whole chunks of thecity” (4).

At the national level, Jimmy Carter preempted Reagan’s embraceof neoliberalism by introducing deregulation into not only the gas, oil,airline, and trucking sectors, but also the increasingly powerful bankingsector (this via the Depository Institutions Deregulation and MonetaryControl Act of 1980). Adding electoral positioning, revisionist history, theconviction of class interests, and affective reassurance to the mix, Reagandelivered a series of speeches and policy statements that aligned him withthe so-called traditional voting constituencies that Carter had failed tofavor: he characterized the countercultural coalition of the late 1960s asthe cause of the country’s demise during the 1970s; he seized on policydevelopments around deregulation and welfare cuts not as a requirement butas an opportunity to unleash market-driven wealth at the expense of greaterequality; and he embodied a form of brill-creamed 1950s conservatismthat reassured many that these radical economic and social changes wouldhelp reestablish the country to its supposedly golden past.6William K.Tabb maintains inThe Long Defaultthat the Reagan administration became“merely the New York scenario” of the 1970s “writ large” (15), the maindifference being that Reagan lacked Koch’s progressive instincts aroundhealthcare, gay rights, and other so-called liberal issues.

Along with the wave of artists, choreographers, composers, ex-perimental video filmmakers, musicians, performance artists, sculptors,and writers who gravitated to downtown New York during the 1960s and1970s, the party hosts and promoters who operated in the East Village, theWest Village, and SoHo appeared to be threatened by these developments.After all, they moved to the area because space was cheap, which inturn meant they could live in a community that was organized aroundcreative work that put a low value on commerciality. As a result, they pursued unlikely interdisciplinary and cross-media projects, exchangedfavors around performances, valued ephemeral art over the production ofobjects that could be sold, and forged a network that was notable for itsintegration and level of collaboration. “Artists worked in multiple media,and collaborated, criticized, supported, and valued each other’s works ina way that was unprecedented,” notes Marvin J. Taylor inThe DowntownBook. “Rarely has there been such a condensed and diverse group of artistsin one place at one time, all sharing many of the same assumptions abouthow to make new art” (31).

If the probusiness, progentrif ication policies of Koch and Reaganbroke up that network, it would have made sense for politicians and culturalproducers to be strategically opposed to one another. However, Sharon Zukinargues inLoft Living: Cultural and Capital in Urban Changethat in fact thecultural producers forged an alliance with real estate investors and the citygovernment in order to drive out industrial manufacturers from SoHo andother loft-rich areas. “Before some of the artists were chased out of theirlofts by rising rents, they haddisplacedsmall manufacturers, distributors,jobbers, and wholesale and retail sales operations,” Zukin writes. “Forthe most part, these were small businesses in declining economic sectors.They were part of the competitive area of the economy that had been out-produced and out-maneuvered, historically, by the giant f irms of monopolycapital” (5).7Zukin adds: “The mainvictimsof gentrif ication through loftliving are these business owners, who are essentially lower middle class, andtheir work force” (6).8Of the 1975 amendment to the Administrative Codeof the City of New York, Zukin argues: “With J-51 [the amendment], the cityadministration showed its irrevocable commitment to destroying New York’sold manufacturing lofts” (13). And in the postscript to the UK publication ofthe book, published in 1988, Zukin concludes: “With hindsight, and with thebittersweet taste of gentrif ication on every urban palate, it is not so diff icultto understand the ‘historic compromise’ between culture and capital that loftliving represents” (193).

David Harvey develops the argument that cultural producers andcapital colluded across the 1970s and 1980s inA Brief History ofNeoliberalism. Indeed, Zukin notes that Harvey’s 1973 bookSocial Justiceand the Cityinspired the analytical approach ofLoft Living, and havingwritten the introduction to that book, Harvey expounds on its centralthesis; that far from being politically progressive, cultural workers becameinseparable from the neoliberal project across the 1970s and 1980s. “Theruling elites moved, often factiously, to support the opening up of thecultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents,” he writes,“The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became theleitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic licence,promoted by the city’s powerful cultural institutions, led, in effect, to theneoliberalization of culture. ‘Delirious New York’ (to use Rem Koolhaas’smemorable phrase) erased the collective memory of democratic New York.”Harvey adds that a conservative distrust of the demographic make-up andoutlook of artistic types caused ripples of dissent that were usually drownedout in the pursuit of prof it. “The city’s elites acceded, though not without astruggle, to the demand for lifestyle diversif ication (including those attachedto sexual preference and gender) and increasing consumer niche choices(in areas such as cultural production),” adds Harvey/“New York becamethe epicentre of postmodern cultural and intellectual experimentation”(47).

Harvey’s and Zukin’s analysis is reasonable insofar as a number&nbsp;of cultural workers purchased their loft apartments and went on to makesignif icant prof its on selling their properties, having contributed to thegentrif ication of the area. In addition, some went on to prof it from themarket-led rejuvenation of New York’s economy through the sale of theirworks and the receipt of sponsorships from the benef iciaries of the neoliberalboom, from Wall Street brokers to public institutions that were charged withthe role of marketing New York as a global center of cultural tourism.However, both Harvey and Zukin overstate the collusion inasmuch as onlya tiny proportion of cultural workers could have moved downtown in orderto participate in a self-conscious project of gentrif ication, while manylived in small apartments in the East Village because even the low rentsof SoHo, TriBeCa, and NoHo were prohibitive. In addition, Harvey andZukin underemphasize the experience of the vast majority of those workers,who were carved out of SoHo’s gallery economy from an early moment,and were compelled to leave the area in signif icant numbers when rentswent up.9While some of the work of the downtown artists was suitable forco-option by the sponsors of neoliberalism, a far greater proportion wasgrounded in collaborative, noncommodif iable practices that could not besold in any straightforward way. Along with Harvey, Zukin mourns the shiftfrom industrial to postindustrial capitalism, yet inexplicably attributes thisto the existence of cultural workers when she argues that they “displaced”industrial manufacturers, or ousted them forcibly, even though the artistsmoved into empty lofts that had been evacuated by industry, either becausethose businesses had moved to areas that were more favorable than downtownNew York, or because they had succumbed to the national decline in theindustrial sector. That could hardly be attributed to a relatively small groupof cash-poor creative types.

New York’s downtown dance scene might have been post-Fordist inits co-option of ex-industrial buildings, yet its core ritual was anything butneoliberal, rooted as it was in the anti-individualist ethos of the dance floor,where dancers abandoned the self in pursuit of collective pleasure, oftenin settings that encouraged the kind of “inter-class contact” advocated bySamuel R. Delany in his bookTimes Square Red, Times Square Blue(111).Indeed owners and promoters disregarded the prof it motive consistently,with David Mancuso and Michael Brody notable for spending huge sumsof money in pursuit of perfect sound, Jim Fouratt and Rudolf Pieper forreinvesting Danceteria’s takings into risk-taking programs and costly interiorredesigns, Bruce Mailman for seeking a degree of experiential perfectionthat left his investors dissatisfied, and so on. Moreover, whereas the arrivalof artists contributed to the regeneration of SoHo and other downtownneighborhoods, the existence of dance venues, and in particular those thatattracted a heavily gay and ethnic presence, was deemed to counter thegentrification process by local residents (who opposed Mancuso’s movefrom NoHo to SoHo, for example). Nor did neoliberal wealth trickle downto the protagonists of the New York dance scene. “All this money came intoNew York, and it was like, ‘Give all the money to the rich people and it willtrickle down to the little guy.’ But that never happened,” notes Ivan Ivan, aDJ at the Mudd Club and Pyramid. “Money was coming into New York, butit was being enjoyed by a bunch of Wall Street guys doing blow, drinkingchampagne, and going to really fancy restaurants. It wasn’t really tricklingdown. Maybe some of the art world was getting some of that money, becausethese people had money to spend on art; but overall it was a pretty hairytime.”

Opposing Reagan, the Mudd Club staged an ironic inaugural party,Danceteria mocked the bland conservatism of the government’s domesticvision, and venues such as the Loft and the Paradise Garage positionedthemselves as safe havens for dancers who lived at the hard-end of economic,sexual, and ethnic discrimination. These and other spots were profoundlyaware of the way their practices existed in relation to wider economic andpolitical developments. “The Pyramid was an amalgam of glamour andthe grungy surround that we lived in in the East Village,” explains BrianButterick/Hattie Hathaway, a drag queen who worked and performed atthe Pyramid. “We also had a very strong 1960s influence that ran through everything; we were hippyish, if you will, idealistic. But of course we wereliving in the age of Reagan, so I don’t know how long our idealism lasted.After a couple of years the timbre of the shows became very sarcastic.”Ann Magnuson, who performed regularly at Club 57, Danceteria, and thePyramid, comments: “At the time, it was, ‘Well, [Reagan’s election] that’sfucked up, but we’re going to keep on doing what we do. People were stillsaying, ‘I’m not going to let this get me down, or change who I am. But theanger kept on brewing and brewing, and the anger informed everyone’s workand performances. There was a lot more ranting and a lot more screamingand frustration and darker imagery.”

Most pointedly, party hosts and club promoters along with noncommercial creative workers were forced to confront the consequences of Koch’sdrive to turn Manhattan into an oasis for property investment. “Between1982 and 1985, sixty new off ice towers went up south of 96th Street,” writeNewfield and Barrett. “Real estate values in gentrifying neighborhoods inManhattan and Brooklyn went soaring, and the exodus of major corporationsfrom New York was stopped. A new convention center was built, a half-dozen luxury-class hotels were financed with tax abatements, and tourismincreased, injecting revenue into the Manhattan economy of theaters, hotels,and restaurants” (3–4). Concurrent property price inflation, which rocketedby 125% between 1980 and 1988 in New York City, priced many partyhosts and club promoters out of large swaths of Manhattan, while taxabatements that totalled more than $1bn in “corporate welfare” left themfull of resentment, as the following examples illustrate.10

Real Estate Determinism, AIDS, and Social Division

The Loft became a site of embattled struggle when David Mancusoleft his 99 Prince Street location in June 1984 because his lease was about toexpire and the building’s owner wanted to cash in on the rising value of theproperty market in SoHo. Mancuso could not afford to meet the landlord’sprice, and, as a countercultural radical who was deeply committed to runningan integrated and ethical party, would not have wanted to anyway, thanks toSoHo’s shift from a zone that encouraged artistic and social experimentationto one that was embedded in boutique consumerism and real estate mania.Mancuso had prepared for his exit by purchasing a building in Alphabet City,which was due to receive a significant government subsidy, but maintainsthat the move hit problems when the plans to regenerate the neighborhoodwere abandoned and the crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980s began to take hold. Mancuso lost a signif icant proportion of his crowd immediately,with many of his female dancers concerned about venturing into an areawhere it was so hard to catch a taxi home. Moreover, the very forces thatpersuaded Mancuso to move encroached on his ability to engage in activism.“It took a couple of years to see what damage Reagan was doing,” recalls theparty host. “In 1982 I knew I had to move, and when I moved from PrinceStreet to Third Street a lot of things changed in my life that meant I couldn’tfocus so much on politics. I was just trying to survive.”

Danceteria was also priced out of the real estate market. For threeyears, the promoters just about met their expenses as they showcasedfledging bands, helped pioneer the staging of art-oriented events in a popsetting, and reinvented the interior of the third and fourth floors at a furiousrate. But in mid-1985 Alex Di Lorenzo, the property mogul owner of thebuilding, who doubled as part owner of the venture, decided to rent hisspace out for more money than Rudolf Pieper and manager John Argento could afford. “Our lease was up and the owner of the building had partners who were not part of Danceteria, and were making money from real estate,” recalls Argento. “We rented the whole building for $1.20 per square foot and he [Di Lorenzo] was getting offers of $25 per square foot. His siblings pressed him to rent the building for more money.” A realtor purchased the lease for $600,000, and Pieper and Argento were among the benef iciaries, yet Pieper had no control over the outcome and took little pleasure from the development. “When Danceteria opened, 21st Street was in an abandoned neighborhood,” he recalls. “You could walk for blocks and not f ind anything open at night. Then, gradually, the excitement of New York brought in hordes of moneyed bores from the rest of the country and real estate prices went up. The club would have continued where it was had not some speculator come up with an offer. Now it’s a residential building with ‘apartments of unsurpassed luxury.’ How exciting.”

The Saint closed a little under three years later, apparently dueto AIDS, which struck the venue’s membership with particular forcebecause the balcony area doubled as a feverish zone for promiscuousand often unprotected sex; indeed, early on AIDS was nicknamed “Saint’sdisease” because the virus was so prevalent among the venue’s members(Shilts 149). Initially, the dance floor dynamic was not affected, largelybecause the venue’s long waiting list meant that sick and deceased memberswere replaced seamlessly, and also because the venue offered those whowere sick or knew people who were sick with a chance to “dance theirtroubles away” (as the Saint DJ Robbie Leslie told me). But when turnout began to decline around the middle of the 1980s, Bruce Mailman openedthe club to straight dancers on Thursdays and Fridays, and numbers cavedin on Sundays as well during the venue’s f inal years.11“The Fridays stoppedand then Sundays became very, very thin towards the end of the 1980s,”comments dance floor regular Jorge La Torre. “I didn’t want to stop going,but when there weren’t enough people to get the party going and f ill thedance floor it wasn’t the same.”

The AIDS epidemic placed signif icant emotional and economicpressure on Mailman, who became involved in a public dispute with Kochas he fought to maintain the right of gay men to regulate their own sexualpractices in the Saint and the St. Mark’s Baths (which he also owned).“Because the circumstances have changed, because political opinion makesus bad guys, that doesn’t mean I’m doing something morally incorrect,”Mailman told theNew York Timesin October 1985 as the tussle unfolded.“In my own terms, my behavior is correct and I’ll do what I believe aslong as I can do it” (Jane Gross). However, according to Terry Sherman, aSaint DJ who was close with Mailman, the Saint closed only when a realestate developer made Mailman an eight-f igure offer that would have atleast doubled his initial investment, and the owner accepted, in large partto satisfy his investors, who had long expressed their frustration that theimmense costs involved in running the club meant they had not seen a returnon their outlay. “Bruce was very ambiguous about selling the club becausehe loved it so much and the last season (1987–88) was actually crowdedagain on Saturday nights,” says Sherman. “He did say to me, ‘Maybe Ishouldn’t sell it this year.’” Although numbers dropped from the mid-1980sonwards, La Torre conf irms that “Saturday nights always had a sizeablecrowd,” and the ensuing success of the Sound Factory, which opened in1989 and attracted a huge white gay male crowd, illustrated that AIDS didnot amount to the teleological, retributive conclusion of queer pleasure onthe dance floor and beyond. As devastating as the AIDS epidemic was for theSaint community, the venue was sold in the final instance because Mailmanalso needed to satisfy a set of investors, and those investors wanted to see areturn on their money that embroiled the venue in the neoliberal turn.

For its part, the Paradise Garage became entangled in a perfect 1980sstorm of gentrification, AIDS, and drug addiction. First the freeholder ofthe King Street location made it clear to owner Michael Brody that thevenue’s ten-year lease would not be renewed when it expired in September1987—because the empty parking lot that lay next to the Garage was aboutto be developed into an apartment block, and the new owner of that block along with the neighborhood association insisted that the club close down.“When Michael f irst got the lease there was no one living near the club,”notes David DePino, the alternate DJ at the Garage, and a close conf idantof Levan’s and Brody’s. “On the corner was a parking lot. Eight years laterthe lot was gone and in its place was a very big and expensive apartmentbuilding. The developer and the local neighborhood association wantedthe club gone so they persuaded the landlord not to renew the lease.”DePino adds: “Neighborhood associations are powerful. It’s not somethinga landlord wants to have problems with.” Brody responded by searchingout possible new sites, but contracted AIDS soon after and resolved hewould not attempt to continue. Brody’s deteriorating relationship with Levan,his totemic DJ, helped him make his decision; always demanding, Levanhad become extremely difficult to work with after he became addicted toheroin.

The independent label sector also lost momentum across the mid-1980s, in part because its representatives were squeezed out by the majorlabels, which were emboldened by the economic recovery, the commercialsuccess of the CD format, and the marketing bonus provided by MTV. Themajors proceeded to cherry pick dance acts such as D Train and FranceJoli, rip them out of their integrated networks, and mismanage them intoproducing albums that did not work locally or nationally. Across 1983 and1984, the majors also started to offer remix commission to cutting edge dancefigures such as Arthur Baker, Franc¸ois Kevorkian, and Jellybean, who foundthemselves working on an increasing number of rock and pop tracks that didnot translate in a club context. At the same time, the closing of Danceteriaalong with the Mudd Club, Tier 3, and other spots that showcased live bandsalongside DJs deprived labels such as 99 Records and ZE of their principalmeans of promotion. Both ground to a halt across 1983–84, and although thiscould be put down to a mix of exhaustion and misfortune, the mid-1980sdid not produce a new wave of danceable punk-funk acts to replace thelikes of the Contortions, ESG, Konk, and Liquid Liquid. Nor did a toweringf igure emerge to replace Larry Levan when his heroin addiction hardened, orShep Pettibone after he went on sabbatical in 1984. When Chicago housemusic started to arrive in the city during 1985, dance DJs embraced ithungrily, in part because by then the majors had succeeded in reclaimingcontrol of dance music, which they flooded with a pop sensibility (Shepherd,1984a, 1984b).

The mid-1980s New York club-music milieu also fragmented asrecord companies and club owners attempted to target their offerings with greater precision. Whereas 1970s and early 1980s disco and dance hadoperated according to the principles of integration and assimilation, mid-1980s rock and rap shifted away from polymorphous rhythm in favor ofa heavier, more aggressive, more masculine aesthetic. The shifting terrainmade it difficult for integrationist parties to survive, and Ruza Blue wasousted from the Roxy when the venue’s owner concluded that her vision wasnot sufficiently prof itable; soon after the venue along with rap music becamemore tightly def ined and heavily commodif ied as the MC-rapper displacedthe DJ-integrator as hip hop’s emblematic f igure. “The management atthe Roxy were clueless, and didn’t get what I was trying to do there,”comments Blue. “They started to book a lot of MCs and groups, and thescene became one-dimensional instead of three-dimensional. It became abit violent and troublesome. There were mostly men in there. Not veryexciting.”

Across the same period, the pluralistic sound that could beheard in white gay venues across the 1970s and early 1980s congealedaround a beautiful disco/Hi-NRG aesthetic, in part because the highcost of membership and entry to the Saint encouraged its regulars toreimagine themselves as individual consumers rather than participants ina fundamentally collective ritual, which in turn led a significant number towrite hostile letters to Mailman when they felt less than overwhelmed atthe end of a night. The flurry of letters appears to have contributed to thedrug overdose that killed the venue’s most established DJ, Roy Thode, and italso led the sacking of George Cadenas, Wayne Scott, and the venue’s mostunlikely DJ, Sharon White, a black lesbian who liked to “play outside thebox” (as she puts it). These and other developments encouraged many ofthose who held onto their positions to eliminate risk from their selections,which in turn led to an aesthetic stasis. The venue’s most popular DJ,Robbie Leslie, acknowledged as much when he told theNew York NativeinMarch 1984: “Music has evolved but New York’s gay market has faithfullyheld on to the romantic period of disco, which was 1978 through 1980.While we’ve all been dancing to that, we haven’t noticed that there are a lotof records being produced that over the past couple of years we’ve ignoredbecause they haven’t f it into the mold that the audience has demanded”(Mario Z). When house music broke into New York in 1985, Saint DJs (withthe partial exception of Terry Sherman) rejected it outright. Looking back,Leslie comments: “Overall we were walking on a cliff edge musically atthe Saint and product was running scarcer by the week. I felt a feeling ofimminent disaster.”

Meanwhile the Garage, the Loft and successor parties continued toespouse a pluralist ethos, but the heightened segmentation of the market,which witnessed rock and rap shift away from dance, and Hi-NRG targetingfemale pop and gay male dance audiences, left them with little to play beyondhouse music. Some outfits attempted to blend the sounds of house and rap,but the experiment was short-lived. Politicized by the inherently divisiveconsequences of neoliberalism and the effects of the crack epidemic on theblack community, black rappers, such as Chuck D of Public Enemy, cameto see house as “elitist” and objected to the way it tried to “separate itselffrom the street” (in Chuck D’s words). Back in 1987, the perception thathouse music’s followers were not interested in addressing the most urgentconcerns of the black community led Chuck D to address the issue in moreincendiary terms and label the genre as “music for faggots” (Reynolds 49).In so doing, he drew attention to the broader failure of the black communityto address the question of homophobia as well as the threat of AIDS, andhe also gave expression to the corrosive effects of neoliberalism, whichencouraged groups that had once sought out common ground to see eachother in terms of opposition and even betrayal.

“In the early ’80s, everything was progressive,” Bambaataa commented in an interview in 1994 (Owen 68). “People listened to funk, soul,reggae, calypso, hip hop all in the same place.” But by the late 1980s,continued Bambaataa, club culture resembled a form of “musical apartheid.”“If you wanted house music, you went to this club, reggae another club, andhip hop yet another club,” he added. In the early 1990s, significant proportionof the “gangsta” rap scene would go on to embrace the Hobbesian trajectoryof neoliberalism, or the argument that the world was made up of individualswhose natural mode was one of warlike competition. “Reagan appealed tothat American sense of individualism that was really tailor made for thehip hop generation,” comments Mark Riley, a regular at the Loft and theParadise Garage who worked in the news department of WBLS and LIB.“I am therefore I am; greed is good; the accumulation of wealth is a worthygoal in life; to hell with everyone else.”

The demographic make-up of New York’s clubs shifted in line withthe times, with Area a case in point. Opened in the autumn of 1983 by fourCalifornians who wanted to place the idea of art production at the centerof their venture, the venue attracted a mix of creative and for the most parthard-up partygoers who were drawn to the ingenious revamping of the club’sinterior theme every six weeks. The cost of this work was so expensive the downers are said to have never made a prof it, but a year or so into its existence Area started to attract a new kind of preppy club-goer, and within a coupleof years this new type had taken over the space. A dominatrix doorwoman,barwoman, performing artist, and promoter whose boyfriend Johnny DynellDJed at the club, Chi Chi Valenti notes: “At Danceteria there were one ortwo of them—they were hideous geeks with a tie. But by the end of Areathere were so many of them they weren’t just an irritant, they were a threat,and I took it very personally.” The shift mirrored changes that were takingplace in the demographic make-up of downtown, where many low-earningcultural workers were forced to leave due to the cost of rising rents. “WhenI got to New York [in 1978] my feeling was the most uncool thing youcould be was rich,” recalls Ann Magnuson, a performance artist who ranClub 57. “Then what started happening was the most uncool thing you couldbe was poor, and it sort of switched like that very dramatically. It shifted forme when Reagan got into off ice for the second four years.”

Koch introduced social policies that contributed to the city becominga more stable and profitable investment prospect while making it muchharder for clubs to operate. Falling in line with Reagan’s National MinimumDrinking Age Act, ratified in July 1984, the mayor raised the legaldrinking age to 21 in December 1985, ostensibly to prevent college studentsfrom drinking and driving. Whatever the intent, the effect on clubs wasregressive, because young dancers injected bodies and energy into theculture; interviewed in 1985, Rudolf Pieper referenced the drinking reformsas “the final nail” (Michael Gross). Feeding the panic that surroundedAIDS, Koch also rounded on the city’s gay sex clubs and bathhouses inthe name of public health, closing the Mineshaft and the St. Mark’s Bathsin rapid succession, even though public health would have been supportedmuch more effectively by backing the numerous organizations—includingthe St. Mark’s Baths—that were educating vulnerable groups about thedisease.

In broad terms, capital fed off club and music culture while offeringlittle in return. When party promoters and musicians sought out cheap spacesin nonresidential areas in order to go about their work in affordable ways,they paved the way for young, smart, cash-poor populations to experience thearea, only for that movement to function as the precursor to gentrification.In a parallel development, the government started to highlight New York’scultural legacy in an attempt to promote the city as a tourist attraction,only for this to lead to the spread of expensive hotels and restaurants thatmade New York a less livable place for the core populations most likely tocontribute to the city’s cultural life. Cultural workers might have contributed to the process of gentrification and tourism, but their involvement was oftenunwitting given that they were simply seeking out affordable space thanks totheir lack of income. Moreover, their presence did not cause gentrif icationto happen, but simply enabled those with more money to move into the areaand escalate property prices. Party hosts and club promoters were caught upin the same stream of developments, and their radically reduced presencein downtown New York across the 1980s speaks to the way rising propertyprices benefited owners and investors at the cost of those who wanted toundertake the simple act of congregating on a dance floor.

Buttressed by the introduction of socially conservative policiesaround zoning and other policing matters, the further embedment ofneoliberal policies supporting the deregulation of the banking sector andproperty investment across the 1990s and 2000s has reduced the number ofplaces where dancers can head out to such an extent that the regressive periodof the late 1980s now resembles a period of wild opportunity. Indeed, thecity’s retail, property, and corporate interests have become so embedded thateven the dip in the real estate market that followed the banking crisis of late2008 failed to augur a mini-revival in dance culture. As a result, a generationof teenagers and adults has grown up with few opportunities to dance beyondthe comparatively constrained environments of social dance forms such asballroom and the tango. Within this context, the highlighting of an era whencollective, freestyle dance parties were numerous and vibrant reveals notonly what New York once was, but also what it can become. The critique ofthe role played by neoliberal economics and politics in the culture’s collapsebrings to the fore the sometimes-obfuscated business and policy agenda thatsurely must be challenged if an alternative urban environment is to flourishonce again.

Notes

1. I am indebted to Jonathan Sterne for suggesting the phrase “real estate

determinism” after hearing an earlier version of this article at the EMP Pop Music

Conference at UCLA on February 26, 2011. My use of the “determinism” moniker

is not intended to suggest that the economic dictates everything around it, including

the cultural, but instead to draw attention to the way the cultural occurs within the

milieu of the economic.

2. Disco historians, such as Alice Echols and Peter Shapiro, refer to 1970s

dance culture as “disco,” but the culture was motored by private parties as well

as public discotheques, from which so-called disco culture got its name in 1973.

Indeed, the private party network was arguably more influential than its public

discotheque counter part for much of the 1970s, which is a case I make inLove

Saves the Day(Lawrence). In addition, the DJs who helped forge disco began their

work in 1970, some three years before the “disco” term was coined, and during

this pre-disco period and after drew on a wide range of danceable sounds that

included but was never reducible to the generic style that came to be known as

disco. Therefore, while “disco” works as a neat description of 1970s dance culture,

it obfuscates its richness.

3. I outline the relationship between the slowdown in the US economy,

the backlash against disco, and the rise of the Republican right inLove Saves the

Day(Lawrence 363–80). An equivalent argument has been made by Peter Shapiro

(227–32) and Alice Echols (205–15).

4. All interviews conducted with the author unless otherwise stated. I am